MONDAY

The first time I saw the Bad Brains (pictured) was on video. It was a seventh- or eighth-generation dub of a dub of a dubiously recorded live bootleg, but I couldn’t have been more blown away by the sheer purity of spastic emotion it channeled. I cranked up the volume (cruddy sound quality be damned), tinkered with the tracking, and strained to follow the furious punk-funk-reggae-space-jazz mix emanating from epicenter HR and his radiant cohorts. The video might just as easily have passed for eyewitness footage of some natural disaster as for documentation of a punk show. HR writhed and screamed and yelped, jumped up and down, and even did a back flip. The camera couldn’t help but betray the unsteady hand of its operator, swept up in the frenzy. And then there it was, clarity amongst the chaos, the split second of footage that made me a believer: HR is facing the camera with the eyes of a man possessed, spitting words into a spirited slur, when someone whiffs a bottle directly at his head. He cocks his head a few inches to the left to avoid it, without missing a beat, and comes off looking like an epileptic Zen master. See what miracles HR pulls off in the concert film My Picture in the Movies, Baby, screened with the Latino punk scene documentary Beyond the Screams as part of a Positive Force-sponsored program on race and diversity in the punk community, at 9:30 p.m. Monday, July 10, at the Black Cat, 1831 14th St. NW. $3. (202) 667-7960. (Colin Bane)